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No. 13: Life is like a box of chocolates. Somebody's usually taken all the good ones before it gets to you.

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Life is like a box of chocolates. Somebody's usually taken all the good ones before it gets to you.

First | Previous | 2015-04-22 | Next | Latest

Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/pomh/?comic=13

Strip by: Ian Boreham

{A box of chocolates sits open, displaying an array of 17 identical chocolates, and one different one in the corner, as well as a space for a missing heart-shaped one in the centre. The box has "Best Chocolate Assortment" written on the front. The guide to the flavours displayed inside the lid lists the 17 identical chocolates as "Hard toffee", the missing heart-shaped chocolate as "Strawberry", a round chocolate that doesn't appear anywhere as "Smooth mint", the only other sole chocolate in the box as "Smooth caramel*", with a note reading "Must be stored at 20 to 23°C, or will transform spontaneously into hard toffee", and a final, also completely absent type, called "Almond crunch".}

The author writes:

OK, well, this is how it often seems to me when I get an "assortment" box. Serves me right for buying myself chocolates, I guess. I often wonder if certain flavours are actually liked by anybody under age ninety, or whether they are just cheaper to manufacture. Perhaps I'm just projecting my own preferences onto the rest of the world.

I realised partway through this that I was in danger of spending way more time on this strip than I could justify, trying to make it look good, just because I love chocolate. It's weird, but I found myself wanting to eat the chocolate I was drawing, even though the chocolates in the box were basically "class B" chocolates as far as I was concerned.

Converting Celsius to Fahrenheit is left as an exercise to the reader, if the reader cares in the slightest.

The strip was drawn in Krita on a Microsoft SP3, with some Inkscaping for text. (Text in Krita seems a bit painful, and I use Inkscape because it's easier, which is odd, since I used to find Inkscape's text painful too...)